Best thing you’ll see all week: Blunt Force Trauma

You’ll know in the first ten minutes if Blunt Force Trauma is for you. You must accept an alternate reality in which people don bulletproof vests and quick draw to try to knock each other backwards with the impact of the bullets. They do it as an underground sport. There isn’t even a name for it. But it’s totally a thing. The contestants, each with his prized pistol, travel the world looking for matches, eyeing each other suspiciously as they wait in bars and parking lots. Fight clubs with bullets instead of punches.

This is why Ryan Kwanten and Freida Pinto, both supercrazyhot, tool around picturesque Columbia in a bright red muscle car. Pinto pulls her hair back to get ready to shoot, but it’s mostly to show us the tattoo of something on her neck. What is it? I think a scorpion or something. It doesn’t matter. It’s a tattoo on her neck. She also smokes a lot of cigarettes. Her name is Colt. It’s all in the service of selling her as a tough gunfighter chick. Sure, I’ll buy. Kwanten broods prettily a lot. He has rubberbands around the grip of his pistol to show it’s worn, which means he’s travelled long and far. Yet he still has time to sculpt those abs. Implausible? Too late. You’ve already accepted that the sport/gunfight contest is actually a thing. Might as well just go with it.

Director Ken Sanzel takes it all very seriously. He uses entire songs by an indie folk rock group called Kid Dakota. And believe it or not, it all works. By the time the movie arrives at Mickey Rourke, all botoxed and looking bored out of his skull, the dialogue is as silly as Rourke’s oddly colorful boots. But by this time, I hope you’ve learned to trust Sanzel. He knows what he’s doing.

Blunt Force Trauma is available on VOD. Support Qt3 and watch it on Amazon.com.